consider the poetry of Gray, and the prose of Johnson. The first a
laborious mosaic, through the hard stiff lineaments of which little life
or true grace could be expected to look: real feeling, and all freedom
of expressing it, are sacrificed to pomp, to cold splendour; for vigour
we have a certain mouthing vehemence, too elegant indeed to be tumid,
yet essentially foreign to the heart, and seen to extend no deeper than
the mere voice and gestures. Were it not for his /Letters/, which
are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was
a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some
thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than that
of Swift's Philosophers in Laputa. Johnson's prose is true, indeed, and
sound, and full of practical sense: few men have seen more clearly into
the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation of the
living busy world as it lay before him; but farther than this busy, and
to most of us, rather prosaic world, he seldom looked: his instruction
is for men of business, and in regard to matters of business alone.
Prudence is the highest Virtue he can inculcate; and for that finer
portion of our nature, that portion of it which belongs essentially to
Literature strictly so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys
and keenest sorrows, our Doubt, our Love, our Religion reside, he has no
word to utter; no remedy, no counsel to give us in our straits; or at
most, if, like poor Boswell, the patient is importunate, will answer:
"My dear Sir, endeavour to clear your mind of Cant."

The turn which Philosophical speculation had taken in the preceding age
corresponded with this tendency, and enhanced its narcotic influences;
or was, indeed, properly speaking, the loot they had sprung from. Locke,
himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay religious man,
had paved the way for banishing religion from the world. Mind, by being
modelled in men's imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility; and reasoned